Freud’s muse ignored? Row breaks out over sale of June Furlong’s art collection

The Liverpool artist’s model, who was also drawn by John Lennon, was understood by some to have left her paintings to a museum

She was a Liverpudlian life model who posed for thousands of artists, including Lucian Freud, who described her as “an exotic creature with a deep penetrating mind”, and John Lennon who, as an art student in his pre-Beatles days, asked if it would be “all right” to draw her.

June Furlong befriended many of those artists and, just months before her death last year, she was understood to have donated artworks that she acquired over the years to a public museum in the Wirral.

Now a row has erupted over the legal ownership of her collection. Artists who knew her are outraged that many of the paintings, prints and drawings that she had earmarked for the Williamson Art Gallery & Museum, Birkenhead, were instead sold by Hansons Auctioneers in Staffordshire in December last year.

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